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February 23rd, 2008

February 23rd, 2008

08:56 am [Link]

The Delights Of This World Last night, I finally gave our um-daughter Carolyn her four-year birthday gift: An Easy-Bake Oven. It was a cinch of a gift, because Carolyn's mom is a great cook and a reasonably obsessive baker - she MacGuyvered up a bunch of cookies with no ingredients while trapped at our house during a snowstorm, since she bakes when she's bored. So Carolyn helps out a lot in the kitchen. Why not get her her own oven? Plus, you know, I never had an Easy-Bake Oven. I wanted one so badly. But I was a boy, and boys don't get to cook on 100-watt lightbulbs. It went well. She made a cookie, and I burnt my fingers on the pan in a valiant attempt to show Carolyn why you don't pick pans up directly out of the oven (those 100-watt lightbulbs apparently do cook pretty well), and I successfully lived out my lost childhood through a small child. Then I determined that Easy-Bake Chips Ahoy! cookies had the delicious tang of long-chain polymers. It's a tossup whether the cookie or the plastic bag the mix came in would be more palatable. But then Kat mentioned that she'd seen many recipes online for Easy-Bake Ovens. The cookies are overpriced ($4.99 a bag for how many?), but apparently there is a whole sub-culture devoted to Easy-Bake Oven hacking recipes. Yes, you too can squish a tiny glob of shortening, a pinch of a pinch of baking powder, a palmful of cocoa, and a dash of flour to make your own gourmet Easy-Bake Cookies! Gourmet? Oh, my friends, you don't know. Because we found this: The Easy-Bake Oven Gourmet: Thirty-Two Recipes From America's Top Chefs. Yes, you too can try Rick Bayless's Chilaquiles with Roasted Tomato Salsa! Or how about an Easy-Bake Queso Fundido with Roasted Poblano Vinaigrette, Warm Kumquat, and Date Sticky Toffee Pudding? Hey, haven't you always wanted to pull a hot quail breast from your Easy-Bake Oven? Oh, sure, you might have to make these dishes individually, pushing each of your twelve servings through the little trap door and waiting for half an hour on each of them. Or, thankfully, Easy-Bake Ovens are cheap, so for a couple of hundred dollars you could get a wall full of Easy-Bake Ovens, ready to go at a moment's notice for your next truly stunning party. Now I want to go to a restaurant where they make all Easy-Bake Oven meals. The restaurant is decorated in bright pink plastics and four-year-old girl motifs. The chefs fetch their ingredients out of refrigerators with drawings magneted to the doors. And every seat - where you sit on a either high-chair or a booster-seat - comes equipped with its own Easy-Bake Oven, where they bring you your gourmet meal on little battered tin trays and you push it in yourself. Eating never tasted so good. (43 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)